Black Fire (28 page)

On May 30, a nighttime arson attempt was made on Pike Street. Robberies resumed and the dull thudding of slungshots echoed through the city. “Can we not catch these rascals,” lamented the
Alta
. “There is a flagstaff in the Square with a block for a rope to run through,” Gilbert wrote of a 110-foot fir flagpole, a gift to the city from Portland, at the gable end of the old adobe City Hotel. “To what better use could it be put than to run up to its very truck, some of those who infest the city, setting fire to the buildings.”

“San Francisco has continued to grow broader and deeper and more substantial,” Captain George Coffin observed. When he sailed there in July 1849, the city limits extended to the west only a mile and a half beyond the Square and to the south only two miles as a
city of tents. Now the Montgomery Block, the first buildings impervious to fire, was being constructed and Montgomery Street rebuilt with fireproof buildings with brick walls two to three feet thick and no exposed woodwork. The doors and windows had iron shutters. The roofs were slated with partition walls rising six feet above them. John Parrott, former U.S. consul at Mazatlan and the top banker in town, ordered a Georgian-style three-story structure built with granite from China, San Francisco’s most accessible quarry. His Parrott Block would serve as a bank on the northwest corner of Montgomery and California. The granite was imported, but the foundation was local—Yerba Buena Island blue rubblestone. As they laid the last tier in June, the granite blocks arrived, each “trimmed to the T-square,” cut to intersect and marked with a chiseled Chinese character to designate its place. When Bernard Peyton, the contractor, opened the instruction booklet, he was stumped. The directions were in Chinese. Unable to assemble the bank, he sent to China for Cantonese stonemasons to solve the puzzle. When the bark
Dragon
arrived, the Chinese foreman unrolled a key sheet from a length of bamboo and put his men to work. As coolies in their native garb with bare feet silently matched the blocks, the building lifted prettily. With only an hour’s break, the Chinese labored from dawn to dusk for a half pound of rice, half a fish, and a dollar. Having contracted for ninety days, the coolies finished on time and sailed for home on the next tide.

“It makes no sense,” Broderick complained. “We send for bricks from the Atlantic states and Australia instead of making our own.” The discovery of large clay deposits where Mission Creek empties into the bay would permit the opening of several local brickworks to manufacture sixty thousand bricks a day. With plentiful bricks, merchants began to construct two-to-three-foot-thick brick warehouses using lava from Hawaii as foundations. Builders cemented on slate roofs and screwed double sets of iron shutters over the doors and windows of the best fireproof, burglarproof buildings yet seen. During the day they folded the shutters back and at night closed them. Intense radiant heat from a fire, conducted inside by the iron shutters, still might ruin inventories, so one owner erected water tanks on his roof to flood the interior if an alarm rang out. Around the outside of the central district genteel wooden cottages with iron fences enclosing front gardens flourished. Buildings demonstrated a magnificent improvement in strength and grandeur with their Gothic spires, mansard roofs, octagonal structures, and cast-iron grillwork. It took droves of northeastern architects
to fireproof the city’s construction—new brick buildings with double iron shutters and large tanks of water on the roofs. The first granite-faced building of the Parrott Block, a cluster of handsome fireproof structures of brick, granite, and iron, would be completed by late December. Henry Halleck, the prominent lawyer, drafted plans for a completely fireproof building on the southeast corner of the intersection of Montgomery and Washington streets. He got his $3 million worth—a Florentine facade closed at the back, framed stone columns and artesian wells, deep groundwork, and metal bulkhead doors packed with asbestos. Deep-set windows of French and Belgian glass covered with heavy double iron shutters locked out any fire. Two-foot-thick walls made up of two million bricks rested on a raft of ship planking. It stood on redwood piles dovetailed into tiers bolted, anchored, and tied with earthquake-resistant cables in a deeply excavated basement. The whole shebang floated on water. Halleck did not get his open courtyard in the center. It would create a vacuum to draw in flames if a fire should sweep in from hillside or waterside. He settled for a light well. Behind its heavy firewalls, the building would survive every big quake for the next hundred years, and only then be replaced by a modern pyramidal skyscraper. In 1853, the Montgomery Block would provide quarters for Colonel Joe Lawrence’s
Golden Era;
Ed Stahle’s steam baths, where Sawyer would meet Twain; and rooms for dozens of professional men, scientists, lawyers, and artists. Gold from the diggings arriving on carts clattered up from the docks under a dozen musket guards. A Chinese bookkeeper called the count as gold in nugget and cornmeal form was unloaded and trundled to Adams and Company’s offices on the Merchant Street side. Their foot-thick outer iron doors kept out fire but also kept it in. Inside, gold was melted, refined, and cast into ingots in their red-hot furnace in a brick-lined cellar. The bars were lowered into the coolness of a deep, iron-shafted vault.

Political patronage to the volunteers dwindled as the city began to contribute its part to the construction of firehouses and oversee a revamping of the fourteen engine companies and three hook and ladder units. Five’s firehouse had been demolished. Their new building on Sacramento Street between Sansome and Leidesdorff streets was a huge improvement. On March 25, the California State Legislature enacted a bill that exempted all volunteers from both jury duty and military service. Years later, when Sawyer and a group of firemen formed the Exempt
Fire Company, the grateful state voted them an engine house and their own fire equipment.

On May 1, the Rassette House, a wooden five-story firetrap on Bush Street, caught fire and Dutch Charley distinguished himself by saving four hundred citizens trapped inside. The
Pacific News
wrote, “Charley Duane comes forth from the blazing rafters of the Rassette and the old St. Francis, half-drowned and half-roasted, a redeemed man and useful citizen.” The first day of June 1851 came. San Francisco’s gravity-flow reservoir stood at empty after such a dry winter. Only a bare film of moisture coated the tar-sealed bases of the cisterns. Several small fires were set in the outskirts of town and the fire bell tolled at least once each night. “This rascal, this arsonist—I am beside myself with worry,” wailed the mayor on the drizzly morning of June 2. “Will we ever have a clue to who he is?” He was about to get his answer.

At 9:00
A.M.
, over on Long Wharf, angry words were being exchanged at the Collier House between the lodger and Henry Stowell, the lower-floor proprietor and bartender. Finally Stowell ordered the lodger to leave his hotel by evening. “And take along those two other parties who had also engaged your room,” he snapped. The lodger shot the landlord a menacing look, surprised that Stowell had known about his companions. How much had he heard of their plans? “I’ll have my trunk out by 5:00
P.M.
,” he said.

At 2:00
P.M.
June 2, Lewis Hellman, in room number four, exchanged a few words with the lodger, who had been boarding there longer than he had. According to another second-floor neighbor, Edward Johns, the lodger had moved into the Collier House on May 5, the day after the May anniversary fire, the most costly and deadly of the five fires so far. The lodger told Hellman he was going to the mines. At 3:00
P.M.
, in front of the house, he spoke to another second-floor neighbor, Joshua Nickerson, who lived above the Contra Costa Market. They had spoken earlier that morning, too. “He had taken a part of his things out, but did not give up the key,” Nickerson said. Earlier he had noticed a burned spot in the lodger’s room. “The place burnt was not quite so large as my hand,” he said. Hellman saw him take his blanket and go off. He was back by 4:00
P.M.
and hailed Hellman on Long Wharf. “I don’t believe I’ll go to the mines today,” he told him. “I’ll go tomorrow.” Two hours later he returned and asked Hellman peevishly, “Why won’t the landlord give me a room to live in? He gave you one. He said he did
not wish to rent the room, and wanted it himself. Why can I not have it again?” Hellman smiled. “This is probably true,” he said. “The agents did not care about letting it again.” Around 8:00
P.M.
, George Simmonds visited the Collier House bar to collect rents and saw lamp oil dripping down through the cloth ceiling. He pointed this out to Stowell. “You better go upstairs and see what they are doing,” Simmonds said. Stowell went up and found the door locked. In coming down the bartender met the lodger on the stairs. “What do you want?” he snapped. “I came to see where oil dripping below is coming from. Come down and I will get a light and go upstairs and we will find it.”

The lodger followed him into the bar, where Stowell pointed to the oil spot. “Does that not come from your room?” “It does not,” he replied. “Well I think it does.” They went upstairs to see if there was any oil in the entry. There was none. “Do you pretend to say that the oil does not come from your room?” Stowell said. “It does not,” the lodger said. “There is no oil in my rooms.” They came downstairs again and Stowell pointed to the oil spot a second time. “It must come from your room.” “It does not.” “Then I let the matter drop,” Stowell said later. “I got a chair, stood on it and felt the spot and said, ‘Yes, it’s oil.’ ”

Around 10:30
P.M.
, Hellman was sitting in his room sewing when he became aware of the light step of a man ascending the stairway. He heard the door to the lodger’s room open softly and someone come out soon after, lock the door, and go downstairs. Five or ten minutes afterward, he heard the same soft tread in the hall. Someone had tiptoed up the stairs. When Hellman opened his door a crack to peer into the corridor, he glimpsed the lodger standing with his back to his door. “He stayed in his room, number three, a few minutes,” Hellman said. He “locked his door and went off again—just the same step not to make any noise between five and ten minutes after the same man came up again in the same way as not to make any noise—stepping slowly—I wanted to see what was going on—opened my door and saw the lodger standing before his door. Then I locked my door.” Hellman returned to sewing and then to bed.

In the room on the other side of the lodger’s, Johns and his roommate were trying to get some sleep. Johns heard someone stealthily ascend the stairs and then the thump and scrape of a trunk being moved. He got up and peeked out and saw the lodger in the passage with a large trunk. Hellman, from his bed, heard the lodger go downstairs. Johns, at his door, heard low whispering and the friction of many matches.
When the man came up again, Johns knew it was the same man by the cracking of his boots. He went down again and then was the friction of many matches in the room again. What took so many matches to light? Three visits within an hour. On the man’s last visit someone was with him, whispering. Johns listened but could not make out any words. The lodger closed his door again, locked it, and started back downstairs. Right away Johns smelled smoke.

Stephen Keith, one of the roomers, knocked on Hellman’s door. “There must be some fire somewhere in the house,” he said. “Is there fire in your room?” “No, there’s no fire in my room,” Hellman said. Keith met the lodger in the hall and asked the same question. “There is no fire in there,” he said. The two went downstairs together to the butcher’s shop and found no fire there. “It must be upstairs and you must go with me to help me find it.” Keith hunted around and left the lodger at the top of the stairs. “Don’t leave,” Keith ordered him. Another boarder coming up met the lodger on the stairs. “Where is the fire?” he asked. “I don’t know,” the lodger said, “but I suppose it is downstairs.” A minute or so later, another boarder ran upstairs and rapped on Hellman’s door. “Is there a fire in your room?” he asked. Hellman shook his head and they looked around upstairs but found nothing. Returning along the hall, they smelled smoke issuing from the lodger’s locked room and began yelling for help.

Around 10:45
P.M.
, Police Officer Bryan Donally was walking his beat on Long Wharf when he heard George Simmonds cry, “Police! Come up!” Donally asked what the matter was. “There’s a fire upstairs in the Collier House on Long Wharf and there are some suspicious characters you should look out for.” Donally learned there were three or four persons present when the alarm was given and some sleeping in the rooms upstairs, about ten persons. Donally started up the outer stairs and saw two men struggling at the top. One, Stephen Keith, was preventing a scarecrowlike man in black from coming down with his trunk because there was doubt over who owned it. Donally had reached the fourth step when he spoke to the lodger. “He did not answer me for some time,” he said. “He averted his eyes. There was a light in the sign outside and considerable light in the entry. I noted he was pockmarked and had his boots outside his pantaloons.” He got a good look at the suspect, who was trying to conceal his face. Another man was behind them, also hiding his face.

“Keep an eye on him,” he ordered Keith. “There’s something wrong
here.” He went upstairs to look after the fire. “There was considerable smoke in the entry. I opened the doors of several rooms but could not find the source. Mr. Tufts and Mr. Johns came out of their rooms and wanted to find out where the fire was.” Donally went downstairs, returned upstairs, and found the lodger’s room. He could not see a handle or a lock on the door, but it was barred. He put his arm against the door, forced it open, and entered a room boiling with smoke. He looked to his left. There were two mattresses on the floor behind the door. Clothes, wood shavings, a boy’s waistcoat, two empty wooden matchboxes, and a bowie knife were strewn about. The clothes smelled oily, but there was no pot or jug of oil in the room. Donally stooped, saw there was a hole in the ticking of the top mattress where a round object had been inserted. He kicked at the mattresses. There was a pool of oil around them and a larger pool of oil on top. “Here’s the fire,” he cried. When he lifted the top mattress, the lower mattress burst into flame. The catalyst was a smoldering coal. “It began to blaze between the two mattresses. I cried for water and another officer.” He threw the top mattress down the outside stairs just as a roomer brought water in leather buckets from the downstairs bar. Together they extinguished the fire in the calico mattress on the bottom. Donally came downstairs, asked who occupied the room, and was told it was the man he had detained on the stairs. “He went away,” Hellman said. “It was dark, but I saw him run off.” The lodger had escaped and his mysterious companion had vanished.